With the release of Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown in paperback, I thought it would be interesting to compare Lisa Marie’s with her mother Priscilla’s book Softly As I Leave You, released this year. While there’s obviously differences of perception, the contrast is sometimes quite large. Priscilla’s book would even at times appear to be direct responses to accusations made by Lisa Marie and Riley in their book.
In this installment (part one here, part two, part three), we’re comparing recollections involving Lisa’s estrangement from her mother Priscilla, her escalating drug addiction, and leaving Scientology.
TRIGGER WARNING FOR TALK OF ADDICTION, DISTURBING AND FRANK SUBJECT MATTER AND DEATH.
All excerpts are from each respective book and are being used for educational purposes only. I only quote relevant portions and do not include every variation of recollection. If you want the full stories, please read the books.
Quotes from articles and other sources are used for accuracy purposes since perceptions greatly vary at this point.
Sorry for the delay if you care, real life took over- let’s begin!
Lisa Marie’s Descent into Addiction
Lisa:
Before I became addicted, I was focused […] I didn’t want to fuck around. I needed answers, whatever they were. That had been my focus.
But as soon as that was gone, I was off the rails. When I had my twins and I was in the hospital and they gave me Norco, that’s when I felt the first oh-my-God high from a painkiller.
I was forty.
I don’t really know what I was doing, to be honest. I was getting isolated, slowly starting to get rid of everyone and everything in my life, all the pillars I had set up, all the people and the friends and the relationships. I was starting to, one by one, dislodge and dismantle each and every one of those things.
Riley:
My mother had started by taking opioids for pain after her C-section, and then she progressed to taking them to sleep.
She had turned forty in February 2008; my sisters were born in October that same year (I would turn twenty the following May). After her brief stint with drugs as a teenager she had never touched them again. She drank, but, like she said, as an adult she wouldn’t even take Advil or Tylenol.
Throughout my life she would often say, “If I tried drugs, it would be over for me.” I see now that that was such a strong hint to an addiction issue she had an intuition about. I think it was subconscious, but it stalked her. She had been holding it back with Scientology, with raising children, with marriages, with spirituality. But it was there, like a shadow, the whole time. She’d say, “My dad was forty-two when he died. I’m thirty-nine….”
We never could have imagined it would be something that would come for her so viciously, so late in life.
Priscilla:
It would be a long time before I found out, but there was a worm hidden in the bud of our joy. The birth had been hard on Lisa, and she was in considerable pain afterward. Her doctors gave her opiates to cope. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem, but Lisa had inherited Elvis’s vulnerability to opioid addiction. By the time she was released from the hospital, she was already addicted.
[…] It was the beginning of a years-long battle with addiction that took her to the edge. I was blissfully unaware of what was happening. For a long time, I didn’t know she was taking painkillers. The only thing I noticed was that Lisa seemed more docile than usual, and Lisa is normally anything but docile. I thought at first that she was just tired or simply content with her beautiful girls.
It never crossed my mind that she would go back into the darkness of drugs again. I thought she had left that far behind her.
Riley:
Back in England, there was a tacit awareness between me, my brother, and Michael that maybe my mother didn’t want to get sober. She was always extremely honest, but I think she felt that being honest was the virtue rather than the changing of her behavior. Since she had admitted it to us, the honesty seemed to give her the license to continue with her addiction.
Eventually she realized that moving to England hadn’t been such a good idea. She had distanced herself from all of her friends, and the drug use had increased along with the loneliness and isolation.
Priscilla:
She had pulled away from the family in general as her addiction worsened. The personality changes the drugs brought and her need to keep her addiction secret affected all her relationships. What I had first identified as a sort of docility in Lisa gradually became alarming.
Riley:
This is one of the most heartbreaking things about the last decade of her life—being a mother was the most important thing to her, she had really wanted another chance at it, and yet her addiction showed up.
Her father had been an addict […] So there might have been a genetic component to my mom’s addiction—either way, it just waited around all her life until right after my sisters were born.
And then it showed up and burned everything down.
Priscilla:
One morning when I came to visit, her husband, Michael, was just about to take the twins to school when Lisa appeared. She was half-dressed, with uncombed hair, insisting that she be the one to drive them to school […] Clearly, she was in no condition to drive, and Michael eventually persuaded her to come with them while he drove. All I could think was, Please don’t let the paparazzi be there. If Lisa were photographed in that state, it would become tabloid gold.
Michael realized I was aware that something was wrong, though Lisa had sworn him to secrecy. He and I finally had a long talk about it. He said that Lisa had been taking pain pills since the twins’ birth, but in the beginning, her use had been relatively controlled. But over time, she had started using more and more, and she was now in need of help. When he tried to talk to her about it, though, she resented it and told him to mind his own business. It was creating a wedge between them, and he felt helpless to help her. In her eyes, he had become the enemy.
I understood his dilemma all too well. Elvis had reacted the same way whenever I’d gently tried to get him to address his drug usage. And I knew from experience with both Elvis and my son that my talking to her wouldn’t do any good. It would simply strain our relationship.
An intervention seemed out of the question. As Lisa herself used to say, nobody told her what to do. She was her own woman. Seeking help had to be her decision.
Riley:
The addiction got worse. She was drinking more, taking more opioids. At one point she found an article that said cocaine can help people get off opioids, so she began to do cocaine to get off the opioids and then opioids to get off the cocaine. Her addiction would continue through all of the stints in rehab on the basis that she was always in severe and life-threatening withdrawals that no doctor could understand. She felt all of the doctors were too harsh. They wouldn’t give her enough of what she needed, so she was “doing it herself.”
Lisa:
It escalated to eighty pills a day.
It took more and more to get high, and I honestly don’t know when your body decides it can’t deal with it anymore. But it does decide that at some point.
For a couple of years it was recreational and then it wasn’t. It was an absolute matter of addiction, withdrawal in the big leagues. If I had fully run out of drugs, the severity of the withdrawal would have left me either in the hospital or dead. My blood pressure would shoot up so high.
I just wanted to check out. It was too painful to be sober.
My whole life had blown up, it felt like one thing after another, and I could not take any more beatings.
Priscilla:
By 2014, the problem had gone well beyond painkillers. As she eventually acknowledged, Lisa was taking both opioids and painkillers while mixing cocaine with large amounts of alcohol. She was well aware that what she was doing was disastrous, but she couldn’t stop. She continued trying to hide the extent of her addiction out of shame and fear of losing custody of her children. I didn’t learn many of the details until afterward, for I was one of the people she was trying to hide it from.
The fact that she knew better only made her feel worse. Her children were the only thing that kept her going.
Riley:
My mom came up with all kinds of reasons why she didn’t want to get off drugs, but I think one of the most poignant ones was her feeling of shame about becoming an addict with two young children. Her parenting standards were so high that I don’t think she could ever truly get sober knowing what she had put my sisters through. The one thing that she had always really prided herself on was that she was a great mother. She said, “My music wasn’t that successful, I didn’t finish high school, I’m not beautiful, I’m not good enough—but I’m a great mother.”
When she started to feel like she wasn’t even that, she couldn’t handle it, so she doubled down.
Priscilla:
That year, Lisa entered rehab for the first of many times. She was fighting hard to reclaim her life, but she was losing the battle.
Lisa’s Rock Bottom
Riley:
When she lived in Nashville, in the depths of her addiction, my mom would often drive the two hundred miles southwest to Graceland to sleep in her dad’s bed. It seemed like the only place she found any comfort.
Often, she would take me, Ben, and my sisters upstairs to his room and we would all sleep in her dad’s bed while there were tours going on downstairs. I wish this was a magical time in a magical family place. But the truth of it was, she was in the house desperate to feel protected, desperate to connect with her father. She would lie in his bed, lie on his floor, anything to feel some comfort. It was the feeling of going to church when all is lost and saying, “Please, Jesus, help me.”
And every time she went, she’d point out an empty plot of grass where she would eventually be laid to rest, next to her father in the Meditation Garden.
Lisa:
I had done a bunch of blow and a shot of tequila and a bunch of pills. All that was mixed with stress.
I was really unhappy and my body was not doing well.
Riley and Ben wanted to get me to a doctor—everyone wanted to get me to the doctor, but I wouldn’t go to one in Nashville—so Riley sent Ben to get me […] Ben showed up and he, the girls, and I took a tour bus all the way from Nashville to L.A. We drove because I wanted to do cocaine the whole time and couldn’t if I was on an airplane. I didn’t think I could even get through airport security […] When we arrived in L.A., I went straight in to see the head of Cedars-Sinai. I was at thirty heartbeats per minute. I lay there scared to death.
My echocardiogram came back bad. I was literally losing my heart. My heart was dead, just in pieces.
Riley:
When she arrived in L.A. from Nashville, mom’s head and face were twice their normal size. She went straight from the emergency room to the ICU—she was in heart failure.
It took about a week for her to start to recover. Once she was feeling a bit better, she was desperate to find somewhere safe, somewhere gated, to live. She repeatedly asked if we could find somewhere on Mountaingate, where we’d all lived when I was little, where we’d lost Jaco the pug but where we’d been so happy….
Priscilla:
Because of the custody dispute, the twins legally had to be removed from the home and monitored by designated third parties. They could not see either parent without supervision. None of us wanted the girls to be turned over to Child and Family Services for foster care, so I offered to have the twins live with me while the legal issues were resolved.
[…] Lisa had gone steadily downhill from the day she first filed for divorce. It was like my daughter was disappearing inside a woman I had never met. She was no longer my Lisa Marie. Her drug usage climbed as high as eighty pills a day. Desperate to keep her girls, she lived in a tornado of drug-fueled emotions with no relief in sight.
Riley:
While in rehab, my mom had decided to get bariatric surgery. Her entire life she had been harassed for being fat. The surgery was something she’d always wanted.
It was a strange time to decide to have surgery, in rehab. She wasn’t done with her program […] If you have any experience with addicts, you’ll know that when I questioned her about the timing of the surgery, it turned into a massive fight. That was a dead giveaway. Then she removed me from the guest list at the hospital. In the midst of her addiction, I was a narc to her—I was Pookie (her regular name for me, I was seldom if ever Riley), not a pirate.
I often found myself calling out her attempts to best the system. I would contact the doctors behind her back and tell them that they were overprescribing. But she was Lisa Marie Presley, and so she almost always prevailed, and was furious that I’d tried to intervene. Bending doctors, anyone, to her will was a celebrity phenomenon that she was very aware of. She often told me that the issue with her father, and with Michael Jackson, was that everyone around them always just said yes—but of course she didn’t see the issue the same way when she was doing it herself. In the throes of her addiction, if you wanted to stop her, you were out.
Priscilla:
After a year, Lisa requested a change in the custody arrangements. She missed her girls and wanted a legal way to spend more time with them. So she petitioned the court to make Benjamin and her personal assistant monitors for the girls. Ben would move back home with Finley and Harper. To my surprise, the court agreed, and the twins moved back in with their mother.
Riley:
For her to be able to see my sisters, there had to be a court-certified monitor present. I was that monitor, so for my sisters to move back in with her, my mom had to live with me. And as my brother lived with her, I got my brother as a bonus. So my mom, my sisters, and my brother moved into my two-thousand-square-foot house in the Valley.
Then my dad moved in, too.
It seemed like it could have been good to have everyone together.
But it felt like the end of things.
We’d had this amazing, colorful, beautiful, abundant, fun, joyful life, but in that house, it took a turn and got unbearably dark, for all of us.
[Note: Riley said in a subsequent interview that her father Danny was also battling opioid addiction during this period.]
Riley:
My mom was such a powerful person that whatever she was doing really affected all of us. Our lives were dictated by the tone she was setting, and that tone became very heavy and hopeless. Our mom, the queen, the fiercest of family leaders, had fallen down. I had mistakenly thought she was so strong-minded that nothing could ever truly hobble her. But of course it could. Enough pain can hobble anyone. She’d been addicted to drugs for the better part of a decade and the drugs created a sense of hopelessness that permeated everything.
We were all very close, forever cuddling, curled up in bed together. So when it got dark, how could it not affect all of us? All our lives my mother had been leading the way, and none of us could get used to her not having her usual strength.
[…] Ben Ben finally decided he was drinking too much so my mom sent him to rehab.
But on his return, he was still stuck in that terrible house watching his mother struggle. She was not truly sober, either—she wasn’t taking narcotics, but she was certainly getting high on the post-rehab cocktail. We would fight about it all the time, and she would get vicious, protecting her addiction. Otherwise, she would just sleep on the couch all day. It was incredibly hard for my brother to watch.
Then she had a seizure. My brother and her assistant were home with her at the time—Ben Ben stayed by her side until the paramedics arrived.
I showed up that night to take care of my sisters. My mom was in the hospital. […] had my attention on the twins—they had just seen the paramedics wheel their mother out and were very upset—so I wasn’t able to check on my brother.
After the seizure, my mother realized she couldn’t do this anymore. Though she remained on mood stabilizers, she did manage to truly sober up. […] When she told me that she’d had enough, I remember thinking, Finally. Her addiction was going to be gone. I really felt it was.
[…] When Ben died, I thought it would be a matter of hours until my mother relapsed. But she surprised me and remained completely sober to honor him.
Leaving Scientology
Lisa:
After I left Scientology, I started upping the pills. I thought, Oh my God, I’ve lost my religion and it’s been my only pavement to walk on, my replacement family. Everything was gone—all my friends, everything.
I knew it was over.
And I was so devastated, I used the drugs as a coping mechanism.
Riley:
My mother’s life soon got to a point where she began to feel out of control. She had so many staff, running everything for her, that she didn’t know simple things like how to turn on the living room TV. She had had a great run, a whole decade of letting people in, trusting them. Yet money was a part of her life that she had virtually no awareness about. One day she caught wind that a certain staff member had maybe misused the company credit card […] Most of these staff members were also her best friends. They weren’t thieves, maybe they just got a little lazy. But for my mother it released the dormant feeling that everyone around her had an agenda. Even deeper than that, she thought she was unlovable. The way she would handle these feelings was to exile people, regardless of how big or small the offense.
At the end of that idyllic ten years, virtually overnight, my mother had let everybody go at Hidden Hills—friends, security, assistants, people she had known and loved for years. Her religion. She just suddenly wanted everything gone.
One by one, they were sent away. The only people who remained were her children, Michael Lockwood, and, of course, my dad.
Something in her heart had never left Graceland, hadn’t emotionally developed past when her father died. She said herself how much she wanted friends, but after nearly forty years of continuous letdowns—people selling her out to the press, being irresponsible with her money, dating her for the wrong reasons—she learned to cut people out of her life and not look back.
For the first time in her life, she wanted to be alone.
Priscilla:
Of all the songs on Storm and Grace, though, one song attracted a different kind of attention. It was titled “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” and it is about Scientology. For those who knew the church, it was a protest song announcing Lisa’s departure. She defiantly referred to herself in the lyrics as “transgressive and suppressive,” Scientology terms for negative people. Church teaching requires faithful members to “disconnect” from these negative influences, the equivalent of shunning in some faith traditions.
Unbeknownst to me, Lisa had been investigating rumors about Scientology for years before she released her song. I found this very surprising. Although she had resisted church membership as a child, she had become a more dedicated member than I was, working tirelessly in support of Scientology causes. Gradually, though, she became disillusioned with it. Her misgivings reached a crisis when the head of Scientology, David Miscavige, disconnected from his father and put him in the equivalent of a Scientology prison at a secluded location in the San Bernardino Mountains.
Lisa had had enough.
Fearless and angry, my daughter walked into the eye of the storm, Scientology headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, and confronted David directly. She told him with great anger and passion just how she felt about him disconnecting from his father. Lisa was never subtle when she was angry. The aftermath was frightening for her. She called me from Florida after her visit to headquarters and said, “Mom, I’m so scared. I gave it to David, and now they’re following me. There are black limos parked outside my house and following me around. This is real. This is what they do.”
When Lisa took such a firm stand against the church, it forced me to reexamine my own relationship with it.
Ultimately, Lisa and I left the church at about the same time. She went out with a bang and a lot of headlines. I chose to go quietly. It was hard to leave. There were things about Scientology that I loved. I still miss it sometimes.
Lisa:
I can get really mean and really angry and I freak people out when I get like that. It comes from trying to protect myself from pain. I just push people the fuck away. It’s the fear of being hurt. I know people can hurt me, so I’ll shut them out.
I learned from the best: Michael Jackson. He did it really well.
But even as a child, I remember being really angry with my aunt one time and I said, “I disown you—don’t ever talk to me again.” My aunt! I’m super sensitive and scared and not secure with who I am. I don’t know who I am—I never really got the chance to uncover my own identity. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have a childhood, and though some of it was fun, there was also constant trouble.
And then I woke up. I woke up about a lot of stuff that had been going on around me for years. A lot of people were invested in having me quiet and manageable.
Speaking of that time in her mom’s life, Riley tells PEOPLE:
“I don’t know what came first, the chicken or the egg…I don’t know if she did this mass exodus thing because she started taking drugs, or if it was other way around. She felt this desire to be alone with her children and her husband and away from everything. And then that, I feel, maybe lent itself with the isolation of that, to the drug problem becoming worse.”
Lisa in conversation with Tony Ortega, 2015:
“I talked to Debbie Cook yesterday. ‘Your whole life has been a manipulation, Lisa.’ That’s what she said.
At 25, after I got the inheritance, they started grooming me to be this person who would go out and get everyone else in […] John is my last Scientology friend. Kelly [Preston] kind of monitors us. John and I get unruly if we’re together.
While I was questioning […] my mom and daughter were still in. I had to be real careful. I didn’t want to get them in trouble […] I just know that I started to self-destruct because [Scientology] is corrupt. I needed closure […] Dave [Miscavige] is too fucking scared to talk to me.
[…] “This is the SS, Dave is Hitler. I didn’t join this. I want nothing to do with this. My family will have my back.” […] As I stood up and walked out, she said she would let me know if they declared me. ‘I’ll let the whole world know if you do,’ I said.” […] “everyone was civil. But I’ve had PIs on me ever since.”
She said in that ensuing time she had been told that she had, indeed, been declared a “Suppressive Person” by Scientology.
“Declared an SP for trying to keep DM from breaking up his own family? They’re completely insane,” she said.
Lisa told me that she talked to both her mother Priscilla and her daughter Riley about the encounter, and told them that she needed them to side with her against the Church […] Lisa confirmed that when she broke with Scientology for good in 2014, she took Priscilla and Riley out with her. “They walked when I did.”
[…] [Lisa] had called [Mike] Rinder after they had reached a house in the Nashville area that she was renting at the time. “Riley was there with her and got on the phone. I had never spoken to her in my life. The first thing she said to me was, ‘You’ve got to take these motherfuckers down.’ I was thinking in my head, wow, that’s quite an introduction to Riley,” Rinder says.
Like her mother, Riley was upset about how Scientology had handled the matter, and wanted the organization’s abuses exposed, Rinder explains.
[…] I asked [Lisa] why she wasn’t following Leah Remini’s lead and being more public about leaving Scientology and opposing David Miscavige.
“The actual reason is, I have two nannies. They’re both Scientologists. My children are so in love with them. And I have a security executive guy who works with me, and he’s a Scientologist.”
She worried about her children being “destroyed” if they were to lose the nannies. (The twin girls were 6 at the time of this interview.) “That’s the only thing holding me back. Believe me, when I want to go, I go.” She told me that she did plan to go public about Scientology once that situation had changed.
[…] “I’m a suppressive person, and I’m the reason my dad died and MJ died. That’s what’s being said inside Scientology.”
She said she was being followed, but she believed that as long as she didn’t go public, she would be spared the kind of harassment that Scientology was well known for.
“I don’t want them on me. They scare me,” she said […] “I’m being followed. I don’t know what he’s going to do. [Miscavige is] going to lose his shit at some point.”
Lisa’s Divorce from 4th Husband Michael Lockwood
Riley:
It was chaos, and in the midst of it, she told Michael Lockwood she was leaving him […] Soon she was out of rehab, but incredibly depressed. She’d been through another separation, and she felt like she had nothing to live for, nothing to look forward to.
[…] She stopped wanting to do anything. She felt like her life was over. She’d say, “I have nothing—I have no husband, I have no friends, I have no life.”
People magazine:
“Riley was always on her mom’s side when it came to Michael,” says a Riley source. “It bothered her that her grandmother and Michael flew to the funeral together.”
Priscilla:
Lisa’s traumatic loss of her father at such a young age left her with a longing for what she’d once had. Every man she loved was subconsciously compared with her father, and none of them could match the exciting, adoring man she’d lost as a child. The pattern repeated itself over and over: hope, disappointment, restlessness, and moving on. As much as I wanted to believe Lisa’s fourth marriage would last, I was not surprised to see warning signs that the relationship was deteriorating. Nor should I have been surprised when she succumbed to drugs for the second time in her life. It was in her genetic makeup.
When she told me she didn’t want to be married anymore, my heart sank. I cared about Michael, and I knew he loved Lisa. I believed he was good for her […] What was happening was heartbreaking. I knew Michael well, and I had always known him to be a loving and devoted husband and father. I also knew that Lisa was very unhappy. She was convinced that Harper and Finley should be with her because she was the mother. She believed that mothers had more rights than fathers since mothers carried and birthed the children.
This appears to be accurate, since Riley says earlier in the book:
My mom would pick us up at the end of the day, but she didn’t really have a lot of interest in our education. We didn’t have to be sick—we could just tell her we didn’t want to go to school, and she’d say, “Great! You’re staying home and hanging out with me.”
[…] My dad, on the other hand, said we needed an education, a schedule, structure. But my mom ruled the roost, and if she wanted something, that was the way it was. My mom let my father homeschool us at one point.
Lisa Sells Elvis Presley Enterprises
Riley:
My mother had changed business management at that time and somehow all of her credit cards had been frozen. She had nothing. Everything was a mess.
Priscilla:
In 2005, our family had a personal and financial crisis. Lisa had never been very good at handling money, and twelve years after coming into her inheritance, she was broke. I was pretty sure that she wasn’t receiving good financial advice, but I couldn’t do anything about it. And talking to her about it was very, very delicate.
What I didn’t see coming was her solution to the problem. In August of that year, she sold 85 percent of her inheritance, including Graceland. She would retain the mansion and grounds, as well as Elvis’s personal effects within the house, but she would no longer have control of Elvis’s legacy. I was devastated. I thought it was a bad financial decision, because Graceland and Elvis Presley Enterprises generated ongoing income for her. But more important, I felt gutted to lose what was still my emotional home, not to mention losing control of Elvis’s legacy. I was heartbroken.I had poured so much of my heart and energy into creating a legacy at Graceland that Elvis would be proud of.
In 2018, Lisa Marie filed a lawsuit against estate trustee Barry Siegel, accusing him of squandering her father’s fortune. She claimed she lost $100 million in inheritance and accused him of “reckless and negligent mismanagement and self-serving ambition.”
Priscilla’s partner of 21 years and father of Navarone, Marco Garibaldi, was recruited by Lisa Marie to add testimony to claims she was swindled by Barry Siegel. According to legal preparation obtained exclusively by Radar Online:
“This particular day, Mr. Siegel informed Priscilla that Lisa Marie was spending too much money, and there was nothing left. Meaning, both he (Barry Siegel) and Miss Presley were running the risk of having no income from Elvis Presley Enterprises […] The solution was simple: Sell Elvis Presley Enterprises, and (I quote Mr. Siegel) ‘We can put ourselves in the new company and draw a salary from it. I want, at least, $500 thousand a year. You (Priscilla) should keep your $1 million a year.’
At that point I left the meeting. I didn’t mind helping her over the years, but conspiracy to hurt her own daughter utterly crossed all moral boundaries known to me.”
An 85% stake in Elvis Presley Enterprises was sold in 2005, and Lisa Marie retained the other 15%, which her ongoing lawsuit has accused Siegel of then squandering. Garibaldi claimed Priscilla personally made $13 million from the sale.
Garibaldi also claimed in the statement that part of Siegel’s method was to get his clients to sign a Power of Attorney document which “allows him extraordinary control over his clients including opening and closing bank accounts, depositing and withdrawing money, making investments, paying bills, applying for credit/debit cards,” and that in his dealings, Siegel allegedly ordered signature stamps from the bank, so he could stamp checks and documents on behalf of his clients.
In response to Lisa’s lawsuit, Siegel said he repeatedly warned Lisa to watch her spending, but she allegedly only continued to spend more money than her Trust would provide and that her suit made various false accusations.
People magazine:
When Lisa Marie launched her music career in 2003, she appointed her business manager Barry Siegel as a co-trustee with Priscilla. Less than two years into his role, Siegel sold 85 percent of the trust’s interests in EPE, which was still worth around $100 million.
By 2015 the trust was left with only $14,000 in cash and mountains of debt, leading to Lisa Marie’s lawsuit against Siegel in 2018 for mismanagement of her trust. She alleged that Siegel had given Priscilla an annual salary of $900,000, though [Priscilla] had no ownership or official position in EPE. (She and Siegel settled for an undisclosed amount out of court.)
“I can assure you, in the last seven years of Lisa’s life, she never discussed with Priscilla any business,” [Lisa’s] friend maintains, adding that before Benjamin’s death, Lisa Marie had “inquired on multiple occasions what it would take” to buy back more of a stake in EPE.
“She wanted each of her four children to have 5 percent of the estate,” says the friend.
Lisa Marie and Priscilla’s Estrangement
Priscilla:
Wickedness on a pantomime stage wielding a poison apple is one thing. In real life, it’s entirely another. The malignancy that seeped into my family during those same years slowly began to poison our lives. Rarely does trouble come out of nowhere.
[… Lisa] knew that the only way she could keep the twins full-time was to claim that Michael was an unfit father, so she filed a variety of accusations against him intended to demonstrate that the girls should not be with him. She was encouraged to do this by someone very possessive of her. They felt threatened by anyone who had a close relationship with Lisa, including me, but they were particularly jealous of Michael. In her suggestable state , with a load of painkillers and opioids in her system, Lisa was vulnerable to the bad advice she was receiving.
She also thought I should be more supportive of her bid for sole custody. The conflict between my daughter and son-in-law was creating fissures within our family like cracks spreading across a sheet of ice. We were slowly but surely being poisoned by drugs, by fear, and by suspicion, and I didn’t know how to fix any of it.
[…] In a last-ditch effort to gain sole custody of the twins, she asked me to sign a deposition supporting her allegations that Michael was unfit to have custody of the girls. I told her I couldn’t sign it, for I had never seen Michael behave in the harmful ways she was alleging. Signing it would be perjury. In Lisa’s mind, I was the last hope to prove her charges. The court’s investigations of Michael had failed to reveal any wrongdoing or neglect on his part, so she had exhausted her legal options. Now I was refusing to back her up in court. To her, it was a betrayal. When the divorce proceedings finally concluded, Michael was given regular visitation rights. The girls would live primarily with Lisa, but they would still be with their father part-time. Lisa was unhappy with the outcome. She blamed it partly on my refusal to take a legal stand against Michael. Her anger fueled what I feared most: estrangement from my daughter.
I knew that arguing with her was futile. I would be arguing with her addiction. I also knew with a stab to my heart that she would never completely forgive me. And she never did. I was losing one of the two people I loved the most. I didn’t know yet that I would soon lose her permanently. The events poisoning our lives would prove fatal.
Sources told The Post that Lisa Marie and her mother were basically estranged for close to eight years before her passing:
The friend added that mother and daughter did not even want to sit close to each other at the Golden Globes last month to celebrate the nominated movie “Elvis,” saying: “Lisa didn’t want to have anything to do with her mom. She was basically estranged from Priscilla for the last seven to eight years. They only talked when there was no option.
The friend laid bare the difficult relationship between Lisa Marie and her mother, adding: “I know with Lisa and Priscilla that they always had a strange relationship. They were often estranged.
It was quite often Priscilla, Lisa Marie’s half-brother, Navarone, and her ex-husband Michael Lockwood together in one corner … It was always a bone of contention for Lisa.
ET Online:
“Lisa Marie was struggling, and it definitely put a strain on her relationship with her mother,” the source says. “They did not have a healthy or close relationship and it was very complicated. Lisa Marie always felt Priscilla was trying to have control over her.”
Page Six:
A friend of the late singer-songwriter tells Page Six exclusively, “She had no relationship with Priscilla, [her ex-husband] Michael Lockwood or her half-brother [Navarone Garibaldi].”
Riley:
[While there is no mention of estrangement or even Priscilla late in the book, she does say earlier:
I probably saw Nona once a week at least. Every holiday, every Christmas, every Sunday, we all spent them together. I was dimly aware that my mom and her mom had had real issues when my mother was younger, but if you look at family photo albums or home videos, you’d see a very close family.
[…] I wasn’t aware of the full details of my mother’s relationship with her mother until much later. For a long time, they let the past be the past so that Priscilla could be a grandmother for us kids. From my point of view, we were a close, normal family. Those Sunday dinners at Nona’s went on well into my twenties.
There were a solid two decades where our family felt very normal to me.
Riley would later elaborate on a podcast that there wasn’t a solid estrangement between her mother and grandmother, they still spoke and attended the same events.
Up next: the end, since this was too long to fit in one post.
Sources: From Here to the Great Unknown – Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough (2024), Softly As I Leave You – Priscilla Presley (2025), Lisa turns against Priscilla, Lisa on leaving Scientology, Riley on Lisa leaving Scientology, Priscilla’s money grab, Friend of Lisa talks Priscilla suing Riley, Inside Priscilla Presley and Riley Keough’s Fight Over Lisa Marie’s Trust, Instagram: one, two, three, four, five
